29 January 2011

29th of January

MilestonesNothing again. Its been pretty warm all week, so they have been off.

BOINC versionsWe had 6.12.12 this week. This one is a release candidate. So far only a few minor problems reported to do with translations into German and French. I have it on 3 machines and have yet to experience any issues with it, but I need to give it some more testing around the work-fetch area.

GTX560 releasedNvidia released the GTX560 during the week. This uses a new gpu designated GF114. It has 384 cuda cores (aka shaders). Palit have a nice looking dual-fan overclocked model called the GTX560 Ti Sonic. Its specs looks quite impressive for the $210 (AUD) price tag, so it may become the "standard" card in most of my number crunchers.

At the moment its a toss-up between an overclocked GTX560 or an overclocked GTX570, both from Palit. I'll wait and see if we can get some real-life run times from fellow crunchers before buying anything. Besides nobody has any stock.

Kirk in the shopWell it worked last week when it came home after its upgrade. Last night when I fired it up, after having a week off, it had problems. It started off alright and when I downloaded some new work errored out the whole lot. It also locked up a couple of times and I had to use the reset switch.

This morning its back to the shop for them to look at. Of course it decided to work straight out of the box. Anyway I left it with them doing a memory test and will pick it up next week.

Server bitsThe shop are supplying a case, power supply, motherboard and I am supplying the other bits. This morning I dropped off the memory kit and Windows Server 2008 to put in it. I managed to find a shop selling Windows Server 2008 fairly cheap while I was in Melbourne during the week.

I ordered some hard disks for the new server on Friday and they should arrive next week. Its getting 3 x 1Tb WD caviar black drives which will be configured as a raid 5 array.